A Really Random Robot Available on MetaTrader 5

MetaQuotes announced yesterday that from now on the source code for MetaTrader 5 expert advisors written by 3rd parties (such as the Trading Gurus!) will be made available for download through the MT5 client terminal.  To celebrate this fact we've rewritten our latest "Really Random Robot" in an object-oriented style, and uploaded it to the MQL5 Code Base.  MetaQuotes have already kindly translated the instructions into Russian for us!  We're eagerly waiting to discover how many MetaTrader 5 beta testers download it and try it out. So far today we're up to 16.

Now you might well be asking yourselves at this point:

What on Earth is the point of an automated trading system that simply simulates tossing a coin at the earliest opportunity when deciding when and in which direction to enter the market?

Well the first reason is that it demonstrates a framework for building more complicated "robots", but in the simplest way possible. The second reason is that we think it is actually worth spending a lot of time investigating the performance of trading systems that include some element of randomness in their design.  You can learn a lot about the way markets work, and the way "robots" work, by pondering the question "Why?" long and hard. For example:

Why does an extremely dumb trading system that uses the toss of a coin for entries make a profit in some circumstances?